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Monthly Archives: August 2006
Stopping the spam after moving house
A few weeks ago I moved this blog to this new location but left a 301 redirect on all URLs on the old site. That has worked great to direct traffic here but unfortunately it has also redirected all the spam attempts on my old site to here too. Thankfully they’re not much of an issue because the POST information is lost but it’s annoying seeing them appear in the logs.
Thanks to the wonders of mod_rewrite it’s possible to stop those guys before they hit any PHP script. My blog was originally at http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/ and of course, the new site is http://ocaoimh.ie/. There are two way of stopping those requests:
- On the new server, add the following lines to the .htaccess of the virtual host:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://blogs\.linux\.ie/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^wp-comments-post.php – [F]
- Or, on the old server add this to the .htaccess there:
RewriteRule ^xeer/wp-comments-post.php – [F]
The latter rule is the preferred method and I haven’t seen any request come through since I added it in!
If you’re interested, here are the simple rules I use to redirect every url of my old blog to this site:
RewriteRule ^xeer/images/(.*) http://ocaoimh.ie/xeer/images/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^xeer/(.*) http://ocaoimh.ie/$1 [R=301,L]
Adapt to suit your own environment.
Reboot me when I panic!
The VPS this site is hosted on has a tendancy to kernel panic since I upgraded the kernel to 2.6. I'm not sure why, and the ticket I opened requesting help was replied by someone saying I should check the console. Fat lot of good that did me when this site was down for a few hours.
Help is at hand however in the shape of Mark Ferlatte who mentioned that adding the following to /etc/sysctl.conf and running sysctl -p will make Linux reboot after 5 seconds! Adjust to taste:
kernel.panic = 5
Hopefully we'll have less downtime here.
Lucky I got home on Tuesday
This morning 24 suspected terrorists were arrested in the UK as part of an investigation into attempts to takes bombs on board planes in hand luggage. The resulting disruption and restrictions almost made more news than the fact that firebombs with many hundreds of souls on-board could have been launched down on top of US cities!
I'm just glad I got home on Tuesday and I missed all this. It makes me wonder how much the authorities knew in advance – just after leaving Matt in SFO I walked up to the xray machine, unbundled the laptop and my bags and was then asked to step into a machine which blew little puffs of air into my clothes and under my shirt. It obviously sampled the chemicals on me. Lucky they didn't do it at the end of a 9 hour flight, 4 hour wait and 1 hour flight home!
On a brighter note, my luggage made it's way through security fine. I left my sandals in the bag, but took all the wires for the various chargers and devices out and carried them with me. Be warned, their machines are so sensitive that sandals with up to year old fertilizer on them and wires could be construed as a bomb!
Chris offers some advice for those travelling with camera kit. You won't be allowed bring it on board, so buy secure cases specifically for your equipment. He quotes Dan Chung:
I'd been thinking for a while about ordering a case that allows me to check my equipment in the hold if I have to. A solution used by many pros is the Pelican case. … One photographic dealer I contacted said he had already received seven orders by 9.30am this morning.
Always a man to get a conversation going, Damien asks if privacy advocates have any case to make if snooping on telephone and Internet traffic averted a major terrorist attack today?
Post WordCamp, Post SF, Post Haste
Last week I went to San Francisco to meet up with the rest of Automattic and attend WordCamp 2006. There's plenty of coverage of WordCamp so I'm sure you're not interested in me telling you how great it was, who said what, what sucked, etc, etc!
What I would like to say is my heartfelt thanks to Matt and Toni and those who control the purse strings in Automattic who made last week possible. Podz, Andy and I stayed in a fabulous house where everyone gathered to work and brainstorm new features, work methods, discuss our strengths and weaknesses and work super-fast on finally getting the Upgrades feature of WordPress.com out.
What are the guys in Automattic like? They're smart, they're enthusiastic, they're really driven by blogging and making things better. They live and breath blogs and tech but they really do worry about how a beginner views WordPress. They're also fun and great to be with and I look forward to the next Automattic get-together!
Much to my delight everyone I met was nice. In the cut-throat world of business it's not often that can be said. It's such a simple thing, that word, "nice". How often can you describe your work colleagues and business people in general that way? I hope that things remain competitive and fast moving but that people don't lose their humanity over the all-mighty Dollar.
I hope Matt doesn't eat all that brisket, I know it tastes like heaven but I think it may be off by now!
Oh yeah, a final thank you to you all for being so patient when I would say, "hang on, I just saw something" and go shoot a lamp post or a doorway, or some other street furniture or a silly yellow "computer guided" tourist car. I have 5GB of Jpeg files to look through! 🙂
WordCamp Pictures and Words
WordCamp went really well yesterday. I’m a little hungover today so I’ll point you in the direction of others who blogged the event:
- My Day at Wordcamp 2006
- WordCamp Notes
- Scott’s photos
- Camping on Words
- My photos
- Flickr’s wordcamp tag
- WordCamp Wrapup
- The women of WordCamp 2006
- Blog Herald coverage
- Changing Way
- LBnuke – Wordcamp 2006
- WordCamp Wrapup
- Gonzoblog summary – probably the most exhaustive list of meta data about the conference. If Carlsberg did WordCamp summaries, Gonzo would do it for them!
- Finally, Newzpile – WordCamp have a decent number of articles and photos of the event. Looks like I’m the only one to upload to Zooomr however!
- Much later… Mark comes out at WordCamp – Mark Jaquith was one of the many great people I met in San Francisco, he tells all in this post!
Later – I uploaded my images to Zooomr and created a smart set there. That was a nice experience, the uploader is slightly better than a regular HTTP upload and the smart set feature is like virtual folders in Thunderbird. If they had upload by email I’d be there every day!
WordCamp Today!
The day has finally dawned. We leave to help set things up for WordCamp in a few minutes. See you there!
WordPress.com Paid Services
We finally launched the store to the public at large after what seems like an eternity in development! Andy's Custom CSS Editor is the first product there, and priced at $15/year it's very reasonable. Feedback has been positive mostly, although mixed at times.
There does seem to be some confusion about the CSS Editor, you can modify the css of any of the existing themes by taking advantage of the "cascading" feature of CSS. The styles you define in the editor override those in the theme's stylesheet.
I can't wait to see what people do with this. I hope to see a lot of talent come out of the woodwork and make their blogs prettier and unique!
My First Earthquake!
Wow, the house just shook! Toni found some info on it, and I got it from Andy. Magnitude 4.4 apparently, but 42 miles away.
Podz mentioned it too. What did you do when you felt it? Did you run to the door, duck, take cover? No, we blogged it!
2020 Edit: Mark has since moved his blog and his post can be found here.